I would be violating the rules of gaming journalism, it seems, if I didn't write something about OnLive this week. The gaming-on-demand service was the belle of the ball at this year's Game Developers Conference, and has yielded a crop of speculative articles about the future of console gaming as well as many, many bad headline puns ("OnLive is OnCrack," and "OnLive is UnLikely" are some choice selections).

Tuesday I'll be moderating a panel at OMMA Global titled "Play Me A Story: Can Games Help Content Producers Tell Stories?" I've been thinking over the topic a bit during this week leading up to the conference.

It's safe to say that the respective marketplaces for the PS3 and the Xbox 360 have taken up the role that backwards compatibility once occupied -- offering gamers the option to fire up retro titles and play the games that resonated in their youth (or at least that resonated four to five years ago). The fact that "Super Street Fighter II" Turbo HD Remix, a graphical update of a game that's been out for more than a decade, is #6 on the list of top-selling Xbox Live Arcade games, shows that the market for retro games is alive, well, and ...

There's a new, emerging trend in core video game business models: the downloadable content (DLC) "tail." Most recently, Microsoft announced that the expansion for "Grand Theft Auto IV, The Lost and Damned," trounced previous sales records for the first day release of DLC. While company didn't release specific sales figures, still the event was clearly a shift.